# RPG a Day 2026 - 23: Fortune tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2026 ![[RPG a Day 2026 (illo).jpg]] I am reliably informed that fortune favors the bold, which is as may be. You know something that's really irritating to track? Your fortune. Possibly unsurprisingly, I really do not enjoy the traditional mechanism for tracking a character's wealth: electrum pieces, gold pieces, platinum pieces, bronze pieces, copper pieces, groats, not necessarily in that order. It's tedious, frankly. It's a pain in the ass. If I wanted to read about the details of fungible coinage and exchange rates, I would go play some more **[Victoria 3](https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/victoria-3)**, which I may do later, just because there are people who love that sort of thing. To those people, I say that I'm sure your accounting degree will take you far in life. I don't want to deal with that. In fact, I don't really want to keep up with a backpack full of random goods, trinkets, bits and bobs that I might or might not need. Some people find that exciting. Some people find that tracking those particular little elements tickles their pickles when it comes to organization. I'm the last person to be able to criticize that, but I don't care for it. Just like counting out the exact coins in my pocket, I feel like both my characters and I have better things to do. I'm obviously not the first person to feel that way, thus we have wealth mechanics in various TRPGs. ## Sign the Covenant One of the earliest I can think of, though obviously by no means the earliest in the history of the hobby, is in **[[Ars Magica]]**. Mages, after all, are far too busy and important to worry about the now and again presence of mere *funding*. Besides, most of their exchanges take place with some form of barter, whether it be for a few token containers of vis or someone's life. The rest of the time, at best, it's at the covenant level. Your unit of measurement is the pound of silver. You don't track it day by day. This is yearly bookkeeping, as befits a game that is really about characters who can live for hundreds of years and maintain a castle/small village for much longer than that. Even that is more work than I want to do. Once in a while, we have to sit down and figure out how much we spent on our buildings, consumables, provisions, wages, and tithes. Eventually, it still turned into a bit of bookkeeping. Once in a while was okay; it didn't hurt me to do, but it wasn't my favorite mode of play. If I wanted that, I would have started playing **[[Adventurer Conqueror King System|ACKS II]]** years ago. Though, not at the time, because it didn't exist yet. ## Abstract Commodity The truth is that most of the time, juggling money and wealth is a waste of time. No one wants to do accounting while they're sitting there at the table, especially for something as mundane as day-to-day costs. This connects directly to one of my personal philosophies when it comes to game design: you don't put anything down on the sheet that doesn't differentiate the character from other characters and that doesn't lead directly to good play. It's that first part that really makes the difference, just as I don't feel it's useful or important to put down the fact that your character has average reflexes, because so do most everybody else. I don't think it's important to put down the fact that they have average resources to call on when they want to buy a car. It's only interesting to put it down on the sheet when it's unusually high or unusually low. Does your character live in a state of poverty? That's probably worth putting down, yes. It might count as a disadvantage or a frailty. Does your character have more money than [Croesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croesus)? That would probably be worth putting down on the sheet. Does your character have 17 silver and 45 copper? So do a lot of people. Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. Abstracting the value into something that is easy to convey and is only important if it's unusual goes a long way toward making things palatable. ## Laying Out the Dough That's cool and all, but what does it actually mean in play when you need to buy something? Is it time to shuffle off to the nearest town and trade in your ill-gotten dungeon loot for some healing potions and a nice lady of the evening? Do you need to drop some cash to pay off the gangsters that you financed the loan to buy your starship through? What do you do when Wealth is abstracted? Let's assume, for the sake of a made-up illustration, that we are playing an RPG. I specify that there is a trait called Wealth. We're going to assume that the average situation is that you can pay off your day-to-day bills, pay for your quality of life, whatever it happens to be, and just barely scrape by to next time. If you happen to be living that rich Beverly Hills life, you can pay off that mansion, pay for a couple of nice cars, coke a couple of times a week, and you're doing okay with Fair Wealth.[^1] If you're a down-on-your-luck Joe, working manual labor, digging ditches, with a kid and a wife, living in a trailer park, and driving a beater, you're able to do that consistently, month to month, until/unless something comes up. If you're a character in an RPG, you're about 15 minutes from something coming up, no matter what. All right, so the situation rolls around that you need to buy a new car. How do we resolve that? There are two places where the question could go one way or another. Firstly, are we talking about buying a new car that is appropriate to your lifestyle? Living out in Beverly Hills, buying a new car might be dropping by the local dealership and driving out with a new Rolls. Living out in the Redneck Riviera, your new car is probably a little bit of a beater, though it might have fewer miles than the one you're driving. Either way, it's just a bit of an investment, but nothing insane. We'll just roll 4dF.[^2] Apply the up and down shifts to the table, and we'll interpret that as how big a hit it is for us to deal with it. > [!faq] **Fair Wealth** > - 🎲 🔴 🟢 ⚪ ⚪ → **0** > - **Fair** → **Fair** This is a fair impact. What does that mean? How do you want to interpret it? It's the kind of thing that will affect your budget going forward. You might have to make a few concessions here and there, but it's not going to seriously modify your lifestyle. If it had slid down to Mediocre or Poor, you may not have noticed it at all. Perhaps you had more in savings than you thought. If it had been a higher result, that impact may have been somewhat larger, or you could interpret it entirely the other way around. Either way, no real change. We're good. Solid. Let's say that the investment was somewhat larger. You're Joe Blow and you need to fly to L.A. tomorrow because your uncle died and there's a will. That sounds like a pretty serious financial ding to me, so let's apply a couple of steps down the ladder of pressure. We'll make a check that *starts* at Poor. > [!faq] **Fair Wealth** (−2) > - 🎲 ⚪ ⚪ 🟢 🔴 → **0** > - **Fair Wealth** → **Poor** Two blanks, a plus and a minus for an overall no shift. But the modifier already took us down to Poor. This is a bad situation. You're going to have to dig deep. Maybe you can't make ends meet next month. Maybe you have to pass on that family trip to Disneyland. Maybe you can't get the car fixed when the cylinder blows. You better hope Uncle Billy left a few dollars to cover the cost. Fingers crossed. That's how abstract values for wealth come to be meaningful. It's in the interpretation. This example is extremely loose, and honestly, I'm putting it together on the fly. It could probably be refined further if I were going to play a game with this as a component that I was building myself. I probably would refine the phrasing of how it's used, how questions are applied for the dice to resolve. But for the moment, this will do as an example. ## Eastbound and Down Even I'll admit that you can't always get by with just an extremely abstracted view of wealth. Sometimes it's important what you've got in the box. Now, I'm not going to start advocating for tracking every groat again. That would be self-destructive, and nobody wants that. From time to time, it's a good idea to pay attention to things that are unique and specific because those are the kind of elements that lead to more storytelling potential. Every electrum piece is just like every other electrum piece, fungible at its core. But the 11th-century statue of Cthulhu as a maternal fertility figure is not. Made out of volcanic glass and inset with what looks like steel beads for eyes, entirely anachronistic, of course. You probably want to track that in detail, right before you sell it because *nobody* wants the complications that come along with owning it. Face it, you knew that I was going to bring **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** in here at some point, and this is where. Though technically, I'm bringing in **[[Starforged - Sundered Isles|Sundered Isles]]**. This is the perfect moment to mention that I *love* **[[Traveller]]**. It's one of my favorite RPG setups of all time because it lets you be a space trucker, hauling stuff from one place to another, making sure that you buy low and sell high, getting into shenanigans along the way. Nothing says, *"I'm ready for trouble,"* like being one of the few people moving between solar systems and being a carrier of information as well as goods. Here's the thing. You can't do that without actually being willing to track what you've got in the hold. Weirdly enough, I never really minded that because whatever I've got down in cargo is important. Even if it's 37 tons of triticale wheat, it's worth tracking because somebody is going to care that it's wheat. One of the people that care that it's wheat is going to care that it's triticale. Then I can move all 37 tons at full value. Cargo is not a fungible resource. Wealth is. **Sundered Isles** provides tools for dealing with both cargo and wealth and feeds that back into **Starforged**. With that, you've got a great framework for playing **Traveller**. See, it was all going to come together here. So how are wealth and cargo handled in **Sundered Isles**? Let's start with the most basic. You have a supply rating that covers things like reloads for your weapons, food and water, spare parts to do repairs, pretty much anything that you might need to put your hands on at short notice. It's a standard 1 to 5 rating and you test against it with various moves. For a lot of the time, that's all you're going to need. When we start talking about wealth, we look at the treasury. Your treasury is a list of stuff hanging out in your cargo hold, written on your ledger. Each of the things has a value, ironically, that runs 1 to 5. That load of wheat I was talking about earlier? Probably only value 2, and only that much because there's 37 tons of it. A unique AI core that could help orchestrate and improve the function of an entire colony? That's going to be value 5. When you trade or sacrifice something from your ledger, you mark it off, one unit of value at a time. That value 2 pile of triticale wheat, we could trade half of it away and be left with a value 1 pile. The AI core, not something you can break down. You're going to have to either find somebody that really wants it or exchange it for wealth. By wealth, in this case, we mean some form of coinage or trade element, credits, whatever the choice of the day is, something more readily spendable. Of course, some of that value is probably going to get lost in the overhead. If you can find a buyer for that AI core and they want to give you a fat wad of credits, you're probably only going to get a value of 4 out of it. Everybody needs their cut along the way. That gives you a value 4 pile of credits in the system computer,[^3] which would still let you outright buy a fairly impressive thing, maybe a nice apartment on a nice hub station or your own private runabout. Spending your ill-gotten gains is really just a case of finding somebody that's willing to take it. If you contracted to move a cargo, well, find the buyer and give it to them. They'll probably trade you something in return, hopefully something you can use or take on to the next location. Perhaps even just do a little horse trading with it. Don't forget upkeep on your equipment and your ships. What I like about this is that you're not tied down by it. You're not accounting for every coin. You're just tracking what's unusual. Yet it still gives you the feeling of having something to trade. Not every place is going to have somebody who wants what you're selling or can afford to buy it. You can always negotiate, haggle, compel, threaten, or walk away from the deal, and you've got something tangible that you can spin the fiction around. This is my favorite compromise. Enough crunch to give the mechanics bite, but not so much that it feels like you're doing double-entry bookkeeping. ## Exeunt Fortune may favor the bold, but the bold can spend a fortune finding favor. I don't like counting out every coin. Hell, I barely like giving tips, but I do like money, just like every other deeply capitalist soul. Luckily, there has been a plethora of choices when it comes to ways to avoid tracking every individual credit along the way, whether it be a broad single trait or pounds of silver, or the booty that you took off that last ship that you ran into while no one was looking. One way or another, you want to do the Scrooge McDuck thing. Just make sure to pay your crew along the way, or you might find it floating over the horizon without you. [^1]: The **[[Fudge]]** trait ladder, low to high: - **Legendary** - Superb - Great - Good - **Fair** — the neutral midpoint - Mediocre - Poor - Terrible - **Abysmal** [^2]: **Fudge dice** are six-sided dice with two faces marked '+', two marked '-', and two left blank. Roll four of them — 4dF — and each turns up -1, 0, or +1, giving a result from **-4 to +4** that shifts a trait up or down the ladder from **Fair**. [^3]: Maybe your setting trades some wacky cryptocommodity that is mined from the space between the stars. I don't know, man.